Thief remaster unearths wild code secrets
When a classic game gets a new life, it’s more than just a fresh coat of paint; it’s an archaeological dig. Remasters and remakes offer new players an incredible opportunity to experience beloved titles without wrestling with old fixes or confusing control schemes. It’s a chance to uncover hidden layers of history and learn new things about the games we already adored.
Digital Foundry’s Retro Super Show recently delved deep into Nightdive’s current project: a remaster of Looking Glass Studio’s stealth classic, Thief: The Dark Project. For those who appreciate the minutiae of the original game, this project offers a fascinating insight into the game’s creation and, crucially, the Dark Engine that powers it.
Software engineer Josh Dowell, involved in the project, shared some wild insights into the engine’s origins. He discovered a very out-of-date version control repository for the code, which made the origins of the engine’s quirks even more obvious. The history of the project, it turns out, is a story of shifting teams and shifting development.
Looking through the Dark Engine codebase revealed a chaotic but human history. The code was filled with the scribbled comments left by the Looking Glass and Irrational Games programmers—some of which were wonderfully absurd. Phrases like “Giant hack! Never replicate this!” and “E3 hack! We must delete this after E3!” were still embedded within the code, proving that the development process was anything but smooth.
Despite the rushed, hacky nature of its creation, the Dark Engine managed to achieve astonishing feats of audio, AI, and lighting that were cutting-edge for its time. But the true innovation lies in how it handled the visual world. Dowell noted that the rendering and level technology were strikingly similar to another landmark first-person game of the era: Quake.
The resemblance is uncanny, particularly in how the game handled lighting. The way light was turned on and off in the Dark Engine mirrored the mechanics of Quake. However, the difference was where the real innovation lay. While Quake used precomputed visibility, Thief’s approach was more revolutionary. Instead of precomputing everything, the Dark Engine calculated visibility in real-time by treating every doorway as a portal. It determined what you could see through one door, the portals connected to other doors, and instantly calculated the visible space. This incredibly complex system was achieved in real-time in 1998, a technical feat that remains truly impressive.
Thief: The Dark Project Remastered is currently in development, and while a release date is still pending, fans can follow its progress across various platforms.
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